Me for BBC Radio 4 Open Book: "Why put real people in novels? What gives you the right?"

Literary platforms don’t come lovelier than the column slot on BBC Radio 4’s Open Book with Mariella Frostrup, and the other week I took a turn on the subject of putting real people into novels: Marx, Freud, Tom Cruise, Tony Blair, Emperor Hadrian, Her Majesty... Many thanks to producer Ellie Bury for inviting me in. You can listen to the programme on iPlayer here and my slot is from 08:31-12:40. My text is pretty much as below:

If you call yourself a fiction writer, why put real people in your novels – rather than characters you’ve made up, whom you can claim as your own inventions? What gives you the right to appropriate the lives of others?

Well, for starters you might say that storytelling – from Homer’s time, to Shakespeare’s, and ours – has relied hugely on the compelling lives or legends of people who actually existed. And fans of historical fiction expect – even demand – the special pleasure of meeting historical figures on the page.

We all enjoy novels that mix famous individuals with fictional ones: Sigmund Freud treating Sherlock Holmes for cocaine addiction in Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven-Per-Cent Solution; Karl Marx encountering a serial killer in Peter Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem; Mohandas Gandhi popping up as a Boer War stretcher-bearer in Giles Foden’s Ladysmith. Cameos of this kind, short and sweet, play cleverly on one or two things we know for sure about eminent figures of the past.

But what about fictionalising figures of the present day? Tom Cruise might have been un-amused to see a version of himself in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, making small talk in an elevator with Ellis’s murderous protagonist. But, as far as we know, he made no fuss. I gave the young Tony Blair a walk-on part in my novel Crusaders, and I’ve never heard from the former PM’s lawyers, so presumably my imaginative work didn’t amount to any slur on Blair’s reputation. 

Many writers evade a debt to the actualité by creating composite characters, amalgamated from various traits of assorted real people – who, like Frankenstein’s monster, leave no identifiable fingerprint. That method runs into trouble, though, if any reader can spot the unmistakable shape of one real person – as when the poet Stephen Spender read David Leavitt’s historical novel While England Sleeps and saw a character based all too clearly on passages from his own memoir, World Within World.

So, this is risky ground for writers; and some might say that any intermingling of fact and fiction is an insult to historical truth. I began by asking, what gives a novelist the right? Marguerite Yourcenar, author of the masterpiece Memoirs of Hadrian, argued that a novelist possesses a mysterious faculty – she calls it ‘sympathetic magic’ – to enter the minds of others. But that won’t stand up in court against a charge of libel; which is why the wisest course for a writer still is to wait until the person they want to write about is no longer with us.

Strangely, the public figure of our time who seems above all to defy that wisdom is Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth. We’ve seen the well-known dramas of her reign depicted in Peter Morgan’s movie The Queen, and his TV serial The Crown. But Alan Bennett, in his story The Uncommon Reader, was so bold as to transport himself into the Queen’s head for a fanciful tale of how she discovers the joys of promiscuous reading by way of a mobile library parked in the grounds of Windsor Castle. In Sue Townsend’s The Queen and I, the monarch suffers the indignity of eviction from the Palace by a republican government and has to eke out an existence on a sink estate in the Midlands.

Of all people to find themselves so persistently fictionalised – why Her Majesty? Is it because the Royal Family, famously, ‘can’t answer back?’ Or because the Queen recognises her likeness in these fictions? Or, that she simply doesn’t care? Whatever the truth – as a fiction writer I must confess, I rather wish there were a few more like her.

BBC Radio 4 Open Book: 'Glad to be Unhappy'

The other week I was delighted to have another turn in the regular Column slot for BBC Radio 4's unmissable Open Book show with Mariella Frostrup.

It's a lovely opportunity for a writer to address some literary theme of their fancy with reference to current or recent events and one's own writing practice.

For a while at least you can listen to my latest effort on BBC I-Player here, between 10:03 and 14:05. My argument, as the producers pithily encapsulated it, was that 'unhappy books can help us have a Happy New Year.' And below is the text of my lesson.

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"You must change your life. Don’t you think? That’s the customary message of New Year – that any pockets of dissatisfaction you’re carrying about your person are not just ‘winter blues’ – but, rather, – a reminder that the future is now; we have but one life; and the sands in the glass are running.

I imagine all of us who love books also look to them, at times, for help and advice – with our resolutions, our indecisions and predicaments. Every publishing year ends with the round-ups of ‘best new books.’ But come the New Year it’s usually old books that are on my mind – old and trusted friends I’ve come to count on.

In publishing terms, the notion of a book that’s ‘good for you’ is vested mainly in the non-fiction genre of ‘self-help’ – or ‘positive psychology’, since ‘the positive’ is what these books want to accentuate. I’ve never read Dr Thomas A. Harris’s I’m OK, You’re OK, or Susan Jeffers’ Feel the Fear and Do it. But that’s not to say they wouldn’t do me the power of good.

A few years ago the Reading Agency actually persuaded GPs to offer ‘books on prescription’: an approved set of self-help titles for people experiencing various mental health issues. Sometimes a bestseller addresses a similar readership: like Matt Haig’s Reasons to Stay Alive, a layperson’s testament to how the ordinary problem of depression might be confronted.

Of course, depression is not easily dispelled by an £8.99 paperback, however insightful. I suspect a lot of self-help titles are targeted not at sufferers per se so much as interested readers who want some idea of how to prepare themselves for the worst. But then, good fiction gives us that, too.

The Reading Agency also recommends a number of fictional works it describes as ‘mood-boosting’ and ‘uplifting’ – from Poldark to Winnie the Pooh. But what really makes a book ‘uplifting’? ‘The good ends happily, the bad unhappily’ – that’s the famous definition proposed by Oscar Wilde’s Miss Prism. But I was reminded of old Prism recently when a poet friend told me that he just can’t be bothered with ‘gloomy’ literature – that poetry, for him, is all about making clear that life is good and the world is beautiful. 

I do endorse those feelings; but there’s more than one way to relish what it means to be alive. A book that brings solace is not necessarily one that tries to tell us that everything’s OK. Kafka speaks to many when he writes that books, rather than cheering us up, ought to ‘wake us up with a blow to the head’ and ‘affect us like a disaster.’  

For the characters in my novels, things tend to end disastrously. If I’m honest, I plan it that way. Life is good, yes, but one or two of the ineluctable truths of life are tragic. And as a reader I feel braced – uplifted – when a book shows me that these things just have to be faced. ‘Death,’ as Saul Bellow writes in Humboldt's Gift, ‘is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything.’ 

We should all take our uplift where we can, whether it’s Bridget Jones or Jeeves and Wooster or whatever. But there’s a lot to be said, too, for the Kafkas and Becketts, the supposed merchants of gloom. I’m not saying that Waiting for Godot is a feel-good night out, but in the midst of its desolation is a huge moment of uplift, when Vladimir cries out: ‘Let us do something, while we have the chance!’ I accept that King Lear is widely felt to be a bleak sort of a play – all its wisest words coming too late to save the characters from their evil fates. But I can think of few more mood-boosting moments in literature than the stoicism of Cordelia when she’s facing the end. ‘We are not the first / Who, with best meaning, have incurr'd the worst.’ 

This is 2017, and it’s dark out there – cold, too – and it will be that way for a while. But we’ve faced it all before, and we’ll just have to face it again. On that score, the great books never lie to us."